Education, Education, Education!
Cuts, Cuts, Cuts!
I find myself once again apoplectic with rage at the government’s latest knife in the back of the Higher Education (HE) sector. At the university where I work we’ve had an announcement of 127 redundancies and pay rises over the next two years of 1% and 0% (effectively two pay cuts). Meanwhile, student numbers have consistently increased and staffing levels have fallen. The poor students we see are increasingly being forced into greater levels of debt, and it looks like national research funding for my subject area (political philosophy) is being cut or restructured as plans to join theology and philosophy together are mooted. Needless to say – morale in HE is low and people are pretty angry right now. And don’t get me started on the pressure from government to lower standards and pass more students.
So I was horrified to read that Labour are not only cutting £398m funding from universities next year and, but they are also imposing massive fines for universities who accept more students than budgeted for (whatever happened to the target to increase the numbers of those in HE?) and want to squeeze degrees into two year courses instead of three. TWO YEARS! Are they mad? Proof positive that Labour have no understanding of quality education and utter contempt for universities.
The Labour concept of a degree is not an education programme – it’s a training program. A training programme whose value is measured in economic units, targets, standardisation and conformity. A recipe for blandness from a government of faceless and utterly average dullards.
The Conservatives are shrieking in outrage, but their plans will leave students in just as much debt, and the things they’re telling university Vice Chancellors about the cuts they’ll have to make in their universities don’t chime with what they’ve been saying to the press.
It will take a very long time for Higher Education to recover from Labour.